by | BLOG, FREEDOM, MEDIA
Whenever anyone talks about George Floyd, we are immediately reminded that he was a black man unjustly killed by a white policeman and that he is now a symbol of racial justice. The problem is that racism was not even a factor in Floyd’s death — but you won’t ever hear about it.
This past April, the Attorney General for Minnesota, Keith Ellison, declined to pursue a hate crime charge against Derek Chauvin. During a CBS News interview when Ellison was asked on the matter, he stated, “I wouldn’t call it that because hate crimes are crimes where there’s an explicit motive and of bias. We don’t have any evidence that Derek Chauvin factored in George Floyd’s race as he did what he did.” It’s worth it to note that Ellison himself is black. When pressed further by Scott Pelley, Ellison explained “we only charge those crimes that we had evidence that we could put in front of a jury to prove.”
George Floyd’s death was unnecessary and cruel. It was an act of police brutality. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that no one has bothered to take an interest in whether (or not) the Floyd killing had anything to do with racism.
by | BLOG
How is it that serious economists and lawmakers want to follow FDR’s economic policies as some sort of model to follow? People who want to revive his ideas are absolutely insane. FDR took a recession that was ending (it was already four years old when he took office in 1933) and he single-handedly created the longest depression in the history of the United States that virtually lasted ten full years! Furthermore, the only reason it ended was not anything FDR did, but it was economic growth related to WWII.
(One might argue that technically we were not in a depression for the full ten years because some parts of the economy were growing. But going from 18% unemployment to 14% unemployment is still depression in my book.
There is a real concern with Biden mimicking FDR’s playbook. After all, that’s what Obama did — and Biden was his Vice President! Obama’s policies resulted in the poorest recovery since FDR’s New Deal by doing what FDR did: raising taxes, over-regulating businesses, giving organized labor excessive power, instituted policies that discouraged people from working and hurt international trade.
What is Biden doing? Ending Trump tax cuts, raising the top federal income-rate back to 39.6%, raising the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 26.5%, increasing regulation, expanding energy policy and has even created a Civilian Climate Corp for jobs, reminiscent of the old FDR Civilian Conservation Corp. With low unemployment and many areas struggling to find enough workers to fill open positions — like the service industry and manufacturing. As the economy is well underway recovering from COVID, the last thing we need to do is to spend billions of dollars on a new big government program that provides climate-related jobs.
Choosing to model FDR is only going to cause serious economic problems for this country, yet Biden doesn’t seem to think that’s a problem. Like FDR and Obama, continued government interventions and expanding government programs -far less productive than the private sector – will stifle economic growth. Because of this, we face an unnecessarily prolonged economic recovery.
by | BLOG
We have a certain tax rate that exists today because we have to raise a certain amount of revenue. Remember, the only reason we have taxes is to pay for things that the government needs to do under the provisions of the Constitution.
The revenue from the income tax is derived from applying a certain tax rate to the net profit of what people are making. The higher the rate, the more it will stifle economic activity and disincentivize earning more in order to avoid paying a high tax rate.
It seems that Pro Publica doesn’t actually understand how the tax system works. The problem with their latest analysis is that they argue high income earners are somehow getting away with something by not paying taxes on unrealized earnings or gains, but this is something completely different and should be treated as such. If your tax is based on net profit, as discussed above, that should be one rate. But if you decide that the tax should be based on gross receipts — you must actually make the rate lower because it is taxing a broader base.
In other words, Pro Publica is looking at the situation completely backwards. If tax collection is based on a base that includes unrealized income, the rate would be confiscatory. For instance, the death tax is already a double tax; you are paying taxes on income that you already paid taxes on when you earned it. To suggest that we should tax the unrealized gain on a death tax would actually be the equivalent to a triple tax — and from an equity point of view, it completely mocks the concept of fairness.
